Web Apps

Gmail is my favorite email service, and there are plenty of reasons why. The main one is simple: Gmail’s spam filtering is very accurate. I’ve never seen Gmail mark a real email as spam. I’ve been using it for more than two years, and spam has never worried me. Gmail’s storage isn’t unlimited like Yahoo’s, but it keeps growing. In fact, the current capacity is so large that you won’t use it up in a lifetime, so there’s no need to worry about a full inbox. Login page: http://mail.google.com/mail ...

In this age of information explosion, pirated software and music flood the internet. I think very few people buy official CDs to listen to music anymore. Instead, they go online and grab MP3s! In this post, I’ll share a trick you really should know: how to grab music straight from Yam Tiankong. You might ask, “Can’t you already grab music from Yam Tiankong?” True, in some ways you can’t. But now we have a site called GooTube FLV, which parses out the real address of Yam Tiankong’s audio and video, so you can grab its music! P.S. GooTube FLV also works for downloading YouTube videos. URL http://kej.tw/flvretriever/ ...

Yahoo!Messenger for web(referred to as WebMessenger in this post) is a web-based messenger released officially by Yahoo Kimo. WebMessenger comes with a variety of built-in languages, including Traditional Chinese. On top of that, WebMessenger automatically saves your chat history. The only catch is that WebMessenger requires Flash to work, and it doesn't support multi-person conferences. Still, overall WebMessenger is pretty handy — for a while, whenever my computer didn't have a messenger installed, I just used the online messenger on the WebMessenger site. URL http://webmessenger.yahoo.com/ . ...

ebuddy is a web-based instant messaging site that I’ve found quite good so far. It supports many different instant messaging services, including well-known ones like Yahoo Messenger, MSN, GTalk, and QQ (which is popular in mainland China). ebuddy also supports Facebook, though I don’t really understand what Facebook has to do with instant messaging = =. Besides supporting many IM services, ebuddy also offers many languages, including Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and English, so you don’t have to worry about not understanding the interface. But what I like best about ebuddy is that it lets you sign up for one account and manage all your different IM accounts together. That way, you only need to remember one account, which is like remembering many accounts ^^ This article will introduce how to log in to ebuddy, change the language, and use your ebuddy ID. ...

Google Maps, the electronic map service from Google, has added yet another new feature. Calling it “new” isn’t quite accurate, though. It’s really the first time it has appeared in the Taipei version. The feature is called Street View Preview. What is it? I’m sure everyone has seen electronic maps before. They usually look like picture A: ...

I imagine many people need to bring a map when they go out to travel. Google Maps, which I’m introducing today, is a free map service provided by Google. You can print the map, so you don’t have to go buy one at 7-11! Google Maps also makes heavy use of AJAX, so you won’t see a blank white screen while browsing. Website: http://maps.google.com.tw/ ...

I actually discovered that Google can look up movie showtimes when I went to see a movie with a “friend” last time. We had agreed to see a movie, but we didn’t know what time it was playing, so I looked it up online. To my surprise, I found something that shocked me: Google, the all-powerful, even has movie showtimes = = .. And it’s very complete! Google may be a god, but even a god shouldn’t be greedy, you know~~ (I’m lecturing Google!!) Enough chatter, let’s get straight to this Google movie showtimes search feature. Website: http://www.google.com.tw/movies . ...

Worried that nobody reads what you write? Want to raise the visibility of your blog? Funp can help you get there easily. The idea is simple: you write a post on your blog, then submit it to Funp, and Funp puts the latest posts on its front page. Imagine how much visibility your post would get if it appeared on a page that thousands of people are looking at all the time. Of course, because so many people use Funp, posts move off the front page quickly. To stay on the front page for long, your post needs to be “pushed” (Funp’s term for recommending a post) by many people. The more people push it, the more likely it is to be seen. Some people wonder whether Funp really increases blog visibility. I think that as long as your article is good enough, it can also bring a lot of traffic. Don’t believe me? Try an experiment. Spend 5 days without pushing anything to Funp, and record the number of visits on the 5th day. Then pick another 5 days, and every evening between 7 and 9 PM, publish your article on Funp. On the 5th day of that second period, record the visit count and compare the two numbers to see which one is higher. URL: http://funp.com/ ...

Remember the poll we ran on this site last time? That one used the service from PollDaddy. Personally, I quite like PollDaddy's online polling service. Although the interface is in English, its poll widgets accept Chinese input without garbled characters. It's also a free service, and it doesn't put ads on your poll widget like some other sites do. PollDaddy never does that~~ PollDaddy features: Free No ads Requires a member account Supports Chinese, with no garbled text The poll widget has many built-in themes Keywords: PollDaddy, online polls, free polls, blog plugin For more details, check out their official website. ...

As the name suggests, WhatTheFont is a site for figuring out what font a piece of text uses. Its service is a bit unusual: you upload a photo, and it tries to identify the font of the text in it. Is it fun? To me, its only real use is that it gives you a helping hand. For example, the other time I was editing a MapleStory image and had no idea what font it used. If this site had existed back then, it would have been great! One thing to keep in mind is that WhatTheFont does not support Chinese fonts. Site: http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/ In general, WhatTheFont doesn’t place many restrictions on the images you can use for font lookup. The only requirements are that the image can’t be blurry, and it can’t be too small either. ...